Evaluating Automated Seismic Event Detection Approaches: An Application to Victoria Land, East Antarctica

Abstract

As seismic data collection continues to grow, advanced automated processing techniques for robust phase identification and event detection are becoming increasingly important. However, the performance, benefits, and limitations of different automated detection approaches have not been fully evaluated. Our study examines how the performance of conventional techniques, including the Short-Term Average/Long-Term Average (STA/LTA) method and cross-correlation approaches, compares to that of various deep learning models. We also evaluate the added benefits that transfer learning may provide to machine learning applications. Each detection approach has been applied to three years of seismic data recorded by stations in East Antarctica. Our results emphasize that the most appropriate detection approach depends on the data attributes and the study objectives. STA/LTA is well-suited for applications that require rapid results even if there is a greater likelihood for false positive detections, and correlation-based techniques work well for identifying events with a high degree of waveform similarity. Deep learning models offer the most adaptability if dealing with a range of seismic sources and noise, and their performance can be enhanced with transfer learning, if the detection parameters are fine-tuned to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the generated catalog. Our results in East Antarctic provide new insight into polar seismicity, highlighting both cryospheric and tectonic events, and demonstrate how automated event detection approaches can be optimized to investigate seismic activity in challenging environments.